Trivia for
The Trouble with Harry (1955) More at IMDbPro »

• Director Cameo: [Alfred Hitchcock] about 20 minutes in, walking past the limousine of a man looking at the paintings.
  
  
• The film was unavailable for decades because its rights (together with four other pictures of the same period) were bought back by Alfred Hitchcock and left as part of his legacy to his daughter. They've been known for years as the infamous "5 lost Hitchcocks" among film buffs, and were re-released in theaters around 1984 after a 30-year absence. The others are The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Rear Window (1954), Rope (1948) and Vertigo (1958).
  
  
• Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to the original novel anonymously for just $11,000.
  
  
• Location filming in Vermont was hampered by heavy rainfall. Many exterior scenes were actually filmed on sets constructed in a local high school gymnasium. Much of the dialogue recorded there was inaudible due to the rainfall on the tin roof, so much post-recording was necessary.
  
  
• Film debut of Shirley MacLaine.
  
  
• Composer Bernard Herrmann arranged his themes from this film into a concert suite he called "A Portrait of Hitch".
  
  
• When Music Composer Lyn Murray was working on the music score for To Catch a Thief (1955), Alfred Hitchcock was already looking for a composer for this film, which was to be his next. So Murray suggested Bernard Herrmann. This was the beginning of the long professional relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann.
  
  
• One of Alfred Hitchcock's favorites of all his films.
  
  
• Several scenes had to be shot in a rented high school gym because of the rain. In the gym, a 500-lb. Technicolor camera fell from a great height, narrowly missing Alfred Hitchcock.
  
  
• Although this was a failure in the US, it played for a year in England and Italy, and for a year and a half in France.
  
  
• Harry gets dug up four times throughout the film.
  
  
• Edmund Gwenn's fourth and last film with Alfred Hitchcock.
  
  
• Originally designed by Alfred Hitchcock as an experiment in seeing how audiences would react to a non-star-driven film. He was of the opinion that oftentimes having a big star attached actually hindered the narrative flow and style of the story. He also developed the film with a view to test how American audiences would react to a more subtle brand of humor than that which they were used to.
  
  
• "What seems to be the trouble, Captain?" was Alfred Hitchcock's favorite line from all his movies.
  
  
• Due to the indifferent weather conditions in Vermont, boxes and boxes of autumnal leaves were shipped back to California where they were painstakingly pinned onto trees on a studio soundstage.
  
  
• Alfred Hitchcock insisted on using a real actor for the body of Harry. He chose Philip Truex.
  
  
• Bernard Herrmann's score was Alfred Hitchcock's favorite of the seven films they did together.
  
  
• Parts of Bernard Herrmann's score was lifted from the music he had composed for a radio series called "Crime Classics".
  
  

Related Links